Switching Frameworks Yet Again

In today's ever-changing web landscape, small companies like ours need to weigh options when switching out parts of their established technology stack. The challenges are similar to those faced by bigger companies when it comes to adopting new technologies.

Limited time for training, established processes, and ongoing maintenance of legacy projects limit what can be done. In smaller companies these challenges are emphasized by the need for every team member to constantly deliver productive work. Also our clients often are rightfully reluctant to invest in mostly invisible updates of the tech-stack. While we as an agency strive to stay current and competitive, utilizing the best and most relevant technologies.

So whenever there are new tools available and in discussion we try to ensure that:

• it reduces complexity, brings new features, has reasonable popularity, and will be accepted by current and potentially future clients.
• legacy projects can transition without unreasonable efforts.
• The new technology excites and enables the team to experiment and innovate.

There’s probably more elaborate, thorough and sensible criteria for selecting a new tech stack out there. As a small and fast paced company these acceptance criteria seem to work reasonably well for us, though.

SvelteKit had our attention for a while and checked many of these boxes. A new project with some unique requirements and a looming deadline left little time to spare for the tech decision. Driven by several key factors, we took a leap of faith to go with SvelteKit:

• Static HTML Rendering: This was vital, as we were uncertain about hosting providers at the onset.
• Filesize and Performance: SvelteKit's efficiency gave it an edge over React.
• Built-in Animation Capabilities: SvelteKit's animation tools suited our project's interactive graphics needs, especially given our mixed experiences with React and its options in third-party animation libraries.

Our decision to go with SvelteKit was more of a hunch than a well-thought-out plan. But it worked! The above mentioned reasons to go with SvelteKit played to our advantage to deliver the project on time, also the positive reports about the developer experience were spot on. However, apart from all the technical advantages of SvelteKit the most surprising aspect was something else entirely:

The speed at which our developer without prior experience with SvelteKit could be onboarded.

A Revelation in Onboarding

Switching to a new framework often leads to a steep learning curve, consuming valuable time and energy due to the idiosyncrasies and nuances of each system. But our transition to SvelteKit defied all expectations.

What could have been a bottleneck — a tedious and time-consuming process — turned into an extraordinary revelation. SvelteKit's alignment with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, coupled with comprehensive documentation, allowed the developer to implement a large portion of the marketing website swiftly and without further training.

Reflecting on the Journey

Working with SvelteKit was more than a technology switch; it enabled us to deliver a project on a tight schedule with elegance and efficiency. This kind of update to our technology stack had failed us once before, but SvelteKit allowed us to get things right in areas that would have been more complex otherwise.

The resulting codebase is more concise and readable – even to the untrained eye. The resemblance to traditional web technologies, along with well-structured documentation, erased typical barriers to entry, paving the way for swift onboarding of new developers.

The lesson here is not just about a particular framework but about flexibility, adaptability, and being open to surprises in the ever-changing landscape of modern web development. It's a unique insight into how a decision, driven more by intuition and immediate need than thorough planning, led to a better product in the long run.

Conclusion

On top of this we are happy with Svelte in the broader picture of the web’s transition. While the big JavaScript frameworks bring a lot of fancy opportunities they also come with an overhead in complexity. Overall Svelte feels more true to the web than React (not only because we can finally just use class instead of className). With recent advancements in web technology the gap between static HTML plus CSS and full-blown JavaScript frameworks closes and we cannot wait to build our first MPA in a while. Soon! For now we try to keep with our updated technology stack and new found favorite framework for a while.

Intrigued by Modern Framework Benefits?

Interested in experiencing the speed and simplicity of SvelteKit for your next project? Let’s talk! Contact us today for a free consultation, and let's build something amazing together.